Alternative Drummer Profile: fulkramick

 

Meet fulkramick (NY, USA)

What is your current e-drum setup? Please be as specific as possible.

I am using the Roland V-Drums TD-17KVX kit with an Iron Cobra 600 single kick pedal, a Yamaha HS740 hi-hat stand, hitting it all with Promark 5B nylon tip sticks, monitoring with Sennheiser HD 202 headphones and sitting on a standard Pearl drum throne.

How do you record your e-drums?

I usually record drums first for a track, so without needing to hear any other sound source, I simply record direct to an SD card in the TD-17. 

You mean you recorded this song without hearing any music or any idea what the music would sound like?

Yes.

That's crazy!

How did you approach making this video?

I thought about what I like about watching playthroughs - being able to see the stick work and foot technique. I play my kick "heel down", where the majority of drummers are "heel up", and I do enjoy seeing (what to me is) something different. 

What does fulkramick mean?

fulkramick, as an artist name, is the umbrella under which I make music by myself. While I play and perform in several bands and find that experience very dear to me and my expression, being able to say everything vocally and on the instruments I'm using helps push that personal expression in a way I may not ask of the talented people I make music with. With them, my ideas are always embraced and worked with, but having that conversation with yourself about what does and doesn't work is its own growth-driven challenge. To me fulkramick is, at its core, an intensive on that personal expression. 

 

Why did you decide to start playing e-drums?

It was a dark and stormy winter (as always where I live) and the rehearsal space I am fortunate enough to play at can be a challenging drive in the snowy months. It was starting to discourage me from playing drums outside of band practice, so I started researching what I thought could be a good alternative. It is never fair for drummers, really, that a guitarist could practice in their bathroom but they have to have a space typically not at their home.  

What do you like about e-drums compared to acoustic?

I had sat down behind an e-kit about twenty years ago with no sticks, having to use turned around salad spoons for that jam session, so my expectations were not high. I was immediately surprised with the feel of the e-kit that I play on. The mesh heads are tactile and not overly responsive like I was afraid they would be, and the cymbals on this kit have a choke feature which I think is just neat. Compared to the acoustic setup, the hi-hat does seem to lack the nuance I am used to, but I am adjusting. I made sure to use the same model kick pedal for that muscle continuity between these and my acoustics. What I like the most so far is how every pre-loaded kit inspires a different set of ideas or rhythms, each one turns a dial in your mind for an instantaneous new perspective. For recording thus far,  I made a user-kit modeled on each drum and cymbal of my acoustic with the same sizes and material (steel snare, wood toms, etc.) There is so much more to explore with it. As much as I love and will continue to play on the acoustic kit, I am super happy that I could now technically practice drums in the bathroom like those lucky guitarists (and even luckier shower singers).

Where can people find more of your work?

Solo work can be found at: fulkramick.bandcamp.com and on your preferred streaming service (Spotify, iTunes, etc.). I hope to have an album done using the Roland TD-17KVX by mid 2023. For my acoustic drumming in the band Heretofore: heretoforemusic.bandcamp.com (new record coming in 2023). I also play bass in Level:Memory - levelmemory.bandcamp.com and drums in the band: The Sound of Stars Communicating (recordings available in 2023). 

Alternative Drummer Profile: (AL)ICE

 

Meet Alice from the UK!

“My name is Alice and I play a millennium mps 850. I use Logic Pro to record my drums. I record myself playing using three different angles: one front, one side and one above. I only have one camera so I take three separate takes and then edit the videos together. This gives me an opportunity to edit together the best playing out of the three takes. For example, if I play a fill in one take and not in the other two, I’ll keep make sure that the fill is in the final track. 

I’ve started to use drumless tracks so my playing can be heard without any double hits/overlapping from the original track. I use an app called moises to do this. It’s not perfect but it does the job. I mix my own drumming into the original song using the drums and plugins available on logic. Once I’m happy with how it sounds, I bounce it and send the audio as an mp3 track along with my three recordings to my friend who has a bachelors in VFX and he edits the videos together. I currently upload every Saturday, typically after work so my upload times vary between 5-9pm UK time. Occasionally I’ll upload on Sunday instead.” 

Thank you, Alice, for sharing your setup and details! Be sure to subscribe to her YouTube Channel!

Alternative Drummer Profile: Dave Fankhauser AKA Parallax

Alternative Drummer recently got to ask experimental electronic musician and drummer David Fanhauser, AKA Parallax some questions. He not only answered all of our questions in detail, he also provided us with this amazing gear tour! 

Parallax is based in Switzerland and be sure to subscribe to his YouTube Channel here! Check out the full interview below!

AD: What got you interested in experimenting with electronics and drums?

Dave: I‘ve always been a big fan of musicians like Jojo Mayer, Zach Danziger, Mark Guiliana… those guys who dig into genres that are typically not in the realm of „normal“ drumming. It always fascinated me how they push the instrument with the way they approach it. I tried mimicking them in my playing, which was always more fun to me than playing along to, let’s say, „Top 20 Hits Music“. Besides drumming in my free time, I was also intensly listening to electronic music from artists like Aphex Twin, Four Tet, Flying Lotus, and so on… music that typically doesn’t have „real“ studio drums recorded. But that was not important to me. What interested and inspired me was the array of textures that this kind of music has to offer. 

 

The two entities (playing drums / listening to electronic music), though, were always separated. At a later time, I lost a bit of interest in the drums as a whole, started looking what else was out there in terms of instruments, and soon discovered the world of modular synthesis. I was watching loads of YouTube videos (basically by accident), and it became clear to me that I had to get a system. It didn’t take a long time for my modules to pile up, and my setup started to develop. So by falling into the deep, wallet-draining void called eurorack i really got in touch with the syntax of electronic music (literally, because turning knobs in a jungle of patch cables is more fun than scrolling through presets on a computer). Soon, my interest in drumming slowly started to set in again. But I always wanted to somehow link the two sides together. The problem was that i only have two hands, and in my laziness I deemed my vision impossible. It was only after my mind got blown yet again by a different musician, Deantoni Parks. I think he is the prime example of what I call a hybrid drummer, and he proves that your body can indeed serve as a link between two entirely different instruments. Of course, my limbs are nowhere near close the level of independence as are Deantoni’s, but it gave me the push i needed to get rid of that floor tom, replace it with my modular synth and start to play drums with my left hand and the synth with my right hand. Since then, my setup has changed a lot (and still does), and it also is not as strictly conceptualized anymore, but the core idea has always stayed the same: I attempt to encapsulate the sound of electronic music into a new framework whose essence lies in improvisation, real-time sound manipulation, and live-drumming. I call this process „Parallax“.

 

On a funnier sidenote, this „one-man-band“ setup was also just a necessary result of the lack of fellow musicians in my area who share my vision of music making.

 

AD: Would you mind providing a rundown of your current setup as detailed as possible, including software and hardware?

Dave: See video above!

 

AD: What is your experience as a drummer?

I started drumming at a relatively late age (about 11 or 12 years old), and my drumming journey has always been on a hobbyist’s level. Concerning the word „experience“, I guess i can break it into two factors that shaped me as a drummer (and person)

 

1. Experience with drumming in bands, recordings, etc.

 

My drum teacher had an annual event where we, the students, could get on a stage and perform a song of our choice with his tour band, which i think is awesome. I remember playing Baby Love by Mother’s Finest live in front of an audience for the first time, with my heart nearly exploding out of my chest. His lessons were always very groove- and fun-oriented, so this definitely helped me stay on track. Later on i started to get involved with different projects of my dad, who creates music for a living. I played drums on some of his albums, but our collaborations mostly resolved around live-performing with choirs. This collaboration is still going on today. Aside from that, I was always looking for bands to play in, but usually there were discrepancies in what i was hoping to find in the music itself and the people playing said music. Admittedly, I was a bit stubborn and narrow-minded during that time. Regarding genres for instance, i would have never agreed to a classic-rock gig back then, which is kinda dumb. Now, I’m more open. I eventually ended up in a „contemporary-christian-music“-band for a year, but my love for drumming started spiraling down during that time. I had to quit that gig for good. Other than that, I’ve never aspired to play Madison Square Garden with Beyoncé or anything like that, but with the small resumé that i can present, the tendency is clearly more on live performing than session recording.

 

2. Experience with drumming as a form of refuge from the outside world

 

This is an entirely different aspect, but in my opinion one that involves a whole new type of experience - i.e. an introspective one. For me, spending time drumming has always been super intense and insightful. There were times in which I would play the most simplistic three-note pattern like K/R/L for two hours straight, only allowing myself to change the tempo, voicing, subdivision and so on… just to force myself to be creative with those „gears“. If you do something like that for hours, you eventually fall into a trance-like state, where something like a „quintessential particle“ of your Self presents itself to you. I know that sounds pretentious and new-agey, but in a nutshell, it’s just a form of meditation. Spending time in such a state is highly addictive, and for me this has always been a way to shut down the noisy and hectic outside world for a bit.  

 

AD: What are your future e-drum / hybrid drum plans?

Setup-wise, I don’t have any specific plans. My setup is always changing, and it also depends on what I’m working on at the moment. 

Project-wise though, I’d like to combine my „modus operandi“ of music making with other forms of art, for instance visual or other performance art. I feel like that is the way to go, since the whole „band situation thing“ has never really been fruitful. At the moment there’s something in progress with a friend of mine who is a dancer. Currently we’re working with prerecorded material, but my preferred next move would be an actual live and improvised performance of us in the same room, communicating with each other through our way of expression. Art is communication after all. Hers is through dancing, mine is through „parallaxing“.